The possibility of an expanse and what interrupts it
Mariel Harari
February 28–April 11, 2025
Opening Reception: February 28, 6:00–9:00pm
The possibility of an expanse and what interrupts it is a site specific window installation featuring new work by Mariel Harari opening on February 28 through April 11 at Co-prosperity. The work explores how human made systems impact organic beings. Physically, focusing on the way plants grow in relation to sidewalks, buildings and pollutants. Emotionally, investigating how memory can both reinforce imposed values and hierarchies, or be drawn on to untangle them.
The installation consists of fiber, sculpture, drawing, photo and video. A large blue textile presents something uncontained, images of an arm, thumb, bricks and sidewalk squares are stitched on to interrupt the blue. Hybrid sculptures present combinations of trees growing into buildings, self portraiture and limbs emerging from a cocoon of drawn memories, and plants growing from cracks in cement. The video strings together footage from Harari’s walks around Chicago, observing how and where plants contend with imposed environment, the encompassing nature of sky, and what can be learned from openness and softening contrived delineations.
The possibility of an expanse and what interrupts it
Essay
By Christina Nafziger
Living in Chicago, you become both hyper-aware and oblivious to the architecture you move through. The architecture of this city pushes and pulls you in different directions, it forces you down certain paths while deterring you from others. Sidewalks, rows of houses, public parks, fences, and brick walls alter our path and influence our choices. Turn right and take the shady path under a row of trees, or turn left and avoid the uneven and cracked concrete? Through a mixture of planned and unplanned places and paths, our experience moving within this city is inevitably influenced by these structures. Whether we notice them or not, architectural elements are there, affecting our choices.
These are the details that artist Mariel Harari draws out in her exhibition The possibility of an expanse and what interrupts it at Co-Prosperity. Through photography, textiles, video, and mixed media installations, Harari offers us a glimpse of a crack in a sidewalk, a tree that has grown bent to one side to avoid a wall, a column of bricks that was once perhaps a part of a building. Each piece draws attention to the details in the architecture around us that often go unseen yet continuously change and shape the way we engage with the world around us.
What if architecture wasn’t just the buildings we see on our way to our favorite local haunt? Can our body be an architecture, one that is made up of moments and memories instead of bricks and concrete? This is the thread that Harari is pulling at as she unravels what shapes us. Like the tree that grows at an angle in order to catch the sun, the body acts and reacts based on our surroundings. Do we take the path of least resistance, or do we risk it all and choose to push through the crack in the pavement for a chance to thrive?
In The possibility of an expanse and what interrupts it, Harari leans into this connection between the body and architecture by not only inserting her likeness into the work, but also through the inclusion of small, almost hidden objects ripe with intimacy. In her piece that is the exhibition’s namesake, a wall of hand painted fabric cascades from the ceiling in mostly shades of blue. In the top center, the artist has sewn a self-portrait originally drawn in pencil. Surrounding the portrait are various patches sewn onto the fabric. In the middle of the piece, this patchwork creates the shape of a forearm and thumb. Within The possibility of an expanse and what interrupts it, just as throughout the exhibition, the viewer can find references to the human body: a leg, a limb, a foot, a face. But what is hidden quite literally underneath the surface of this piece are small parts of the artist herself. Locks of Harari’s hair can be found sewn into this large fabric piece, as well as the artist’s baby teeth. The body is fractured, pulled apart, and sewn back together through Harari’s own hand.
Another materially ambitious piece is Tree, which beautifully blends hand painted cotton, ink, wood, color pencil, wax pastel, inkjet on silk, and more to form an installation that, like The possibility of an expanse and what interrupts it, has a quality of being fractured and mended. Emphasizing our surrounding environment rather than the body, Tree is both familiar and alien. Yes, it is recognizable as a tree, but the tree sports colors that don’t match with our reality. The branches, too, are representational, but a large, slightly opaque photo of a treetop next to a building creates a stand-in for this section of the tree. The artist cleverly plays with different opacities and materials in a way that fuses together fantasy and reality, forming an aesthetic that draws our attention to the tiny details in the environment that holds us—whether that be the architecture of our surroundings or the architecture of our bodies.
This oscillation between physical architecture and the body, between elements like bricks and limbs, comes to a head in Harari’s piece Cocoon Baby 2 (Feral). Hanging from the ceiling, this mixed-media piece has the head of a human (the artist’s self portrait) but with body parts that do not completely match the human-like features. Cocoon Baby’s limbs seem to be somewhat out of place, if they are not missing completely. Her torso seems to be opening up, as if we have caught her mid-transformation: the breaking of the cocoon. Elements of our surroundings can be seen on her body: a drawing of a brick column on her stomach, tree branches that sprout from her arms. Like each person’s identity, elements of the environment have found its way onto and into Cocoon Baby, causing her to bend, mold, and mutate into different shapes. However, there is an element of hope. Even while holding elements of her environment, even while containing her experiences and memories, Cocoon Baby is opening up. She is finding a way to live, to thrive, to transform into something beautiful under the circumstances, despite the systems she lives within. Like the weed that flourishes in the smallest of openings, Cocoon Baby finds a way.
Nearby is Brick Memory Brick; a small, brick-like sculpture made of slightly transparent biomaterial. We can almost see what’s inside, what memory this brick holds. For me, witnessing this piece was a grounding moment in the exhibition. We are all built brick-by-brick from the moments that made us. We are created from memories that influence how we move through the world, just as architecture shapes the way we choose our path. Will you be like this brick, static, unmoving, and unyielding until it crumbles? Or will we be like Cocoon Baby 2 (Feral), and break ourselves open? As the artist puts it, there is “possibility [in] an expanse.” Perhaps this crack in the sidewalk—this moment of rupture, this breaking open—is the chance we need to open up and transform, to flourish in spite of everything.